Maghreb’s peoples want in on power

The Maghreb, home to the Arab Spring, is freer of ethnic and religious divides than the Middle East and more insulated from that region’s conflicts. Now it is trying — at varying speeds — to negotiate demands for more participation in political life.

We all know that North Africa gave birth to the Arab Spring in late 2010, when the Jasmine Revolution toppled the Tunisian dictatorship, inspiring popular uprisings across the Arab world. Yet we often forget that the Arab Spring’s precursor also originated in the Maghreb — in Algeria in 1988, when bread riots resulted in the promise of democratic opening that tragically ended in civil war.

To outsiders, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia seem quite different to each other in regime type, economic base and foreign policy inclinations. Yet they have all reached points of potential conflict, or potential democratisation.

What makes these countries comparable is that the Maghreb represents a distinctive subset of the Arab-Muslim world in terms of culture, society and geopolitics. By culture, I do not mean an essential set of fixed values and behaviours. Certainly there are superficial similarities, from mutually intelligible Arabic dialects to common cuisine: it is often said that travelling eastwards, the Maghreb ends, and the Middle East begins, where people start eating rice instead of couscous. But culture means a shared repertoire of memories and practices that generate a common institutional mentality. For instance, the Maghreb countries all began independence with a centralised state apparatus, the dual legacy of French colonialism and geography. There was, early on, an expectation of national governance, and a belief that civil bureaucracies of varying efficiency would regulate social and economic life.

Traffic across the Mediterranean

So the Maghreb was endowed with coherent states. Yet the region also contains coherent nations because it has softer ethnic and religious cleavages than other Arab countries. There is no Sunni-Shia divide here — unlike Iraq and Bahrain, where it has been a source of serious strife. There is no confessional system resulting in fractured political institutions, as in Lebanon. Certainly, (...)

(1) The metaphor is usefully employed in Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics, second ed, Princeton University Press, 2004.

(2) This strategy is similar to the weaponisation of information elsewhere, such as Russia, as reported in Neil MacFarquhar, ‘A Powerful Russian Weapon: the Spread of False Stories,’ New York Times, 28 August 2016.